Late last week, the Biden Administration’s departments of Agriculture (USDA) and Justice (DOJ) rolled out the federal government’s latest effort to curb “potentially unfair and anticompetitive practices” in the U.S. meat trade: An online portal where farmers and others in the livestock production chain can report incidents that may violate the Packers and Stockyards Act (PSA) or other antitrust laws.
At the new site, parties can report anonymously and complaints will undergo review by USDA and DOJ staff to see if any “raises sufficient concern” to be investigated by the appropriate agency. The idea is to protect smaller players in the nation’s meat supply chain – and as Attorney General Merrick Garland said about it, “When we talk about protecting consumers in this context, we are talking about whether food will be affordable for everyone in America.”
Long, long ago, in 1921 – pre-dating even Betty White – Congress enacted the PSA in response to a small handful of companies dominating the U.S. meatpacking trade. It designed the law to protect farmers and livestock producers, who had much less power in the domestic supply chain relationship, from being taken advantage of and to see that they would be paid fairly based on animal weight.
This came about three decades after the feds first began investigating meatpackers for colluding to fix beef prices to consumers, and the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act. In 1935, the PSA was amended to include poultry as its own industry, rather...
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